


The After Party

by Hectopascal



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Gen, Trauma, dealing with our feelings like an adult sucks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:35:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hectopascal/pseuds/Hectopascal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story doesn’t end in a giant field hospital, nor as they board the one way flight back to the US, and definitely not when mom and dad kiss and make up and try to make it work just one more time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The After Party

Zack is tired in a way he’s never been before. 

His feet hurt, his legs hurt, his arms hurt, his head hurts, and something in his chest aches fiercely.

Not metaphorically either. 

It’s not an ‘I saw people die my parents are getting divorced Gray’s crying and I can’t get him to stop’ ache. More of a ‘shit I can’t breathe right’ ache like the infrequent asthma attacks he used to get back when he was even younger than Gray.

Those things had terrified him. He’d go months between episodes, just long enough to think they were gone for good and then _bam_! He’s wheezing after running ten feet in the halls, feeling like a giant fist is around his throat and his lungs are lined with shards of glass and every time, every single time, he thought he was going to die.

This is worse than that and all he does is stare blankly across the sea of cots and lightly injured people peppered with less light injuries and keep breathing.

Everything is going to be fine.

He wants to take a power nap but he’d told Gray he’d keep watch and that’s just what he does.

Claire is only a few yards away, standing in an intersection between four rows of cots, but the noise is so great—people moaning and talking and yelling and crying, so many people _living_ in a small space—that Zack can’t hear anything she says even though she is clearly shouting at someone at the other end of her phone.

Grady is standing just behind her shoulder, looking extremely displeased. He might be getting both sides of the conversation and if he is then he doesn’t like what he hears either.

That had been a kinda weird surprise too. Just. Grady in general. 

Velociraptor trainer. Badass. Zack’s new personal hero. Aunt Claire’s boyfriend?

Are they even dating or was the spontaneous kiss thing just a high stress situation working its magic?

Zack doesn’t really care.

His gaze wanders and finds:

A teenage girl with dark red curls and freckles across her whole face. She’s crying silently, mouth closed, expression utterly composed, except for the tears trickling down her face. Her left arm is in a sling but she’s looking at an older woman with brown hair and the same freckles who is on the cot next to her and dead to the world. 

Zack looks at her—them—and feels nothing at all.

An old man in a loud Hawaiian shirt, unhurt and clutching two empty margarita glasses like they’re trophies made of solid gold.

 _What the hell_ , Zack thinks with an indifference that’s beginning to concern him. A little.

Another girl with hair cut pixie-like above her ears, fashionable spikes colored green and blue and purple, and almost entirely concealed by the bloody bandage wrapped around her head. She looks more angry than upset and doesn’t have anyone to sit with her.

A fat couple who everyone is giving plenty of room and disgusted looks that they either don’t see or don’t care about. The woman is genuinely laughing at something the man just said, who laughs right along with her. They have an arm tossed casually over the other’s shoulder and both look healthy, if very sweaty, and happy about it.

Zack looks at this picture of togetherness in the middle of something that could come right out of a war documentary and feels his own spirits lift. Slightly. He tries on a smile but it falls flat quickly. 

And over there, a husband and wife with five kids who should have stopped at one. Maybe none. They take turns screaming at each other while behind their backs the oldest kid, a girl still proudly wearing a cap with the Jurassic World logo, quietly reassures the younger ones with confident gestures and a liberal amount of hugs.

Zack is entirely conscious of his hand moving, tangling his fingers in his little brother’s shaggy hair, and staying there. 

He could have lost him today—the genius of the family, the insufferable pest. His only brother.

Gray could have died so many times. They both could have.

But they didn’t. Everything is going to be okay.

If he says it enough times he might even come to believe it someday.

 

 

(“What’s going to happen now?” Gray mumbled as Grady herded them all towards the docks as fast as he humanely could.

 _I have no fucking idea_ , Zack thought, accidentally dragging Gray into his side because he had a fist in the kid’s shirt and no plans to release him soon.

“Gotta be at least one evac ship still left, at least one,” Grady repeated periodically, whenever they stumbled across more wreckage and destruction and all of it was deserted, like if he said it enough times he could force it into being.

“Standard procedure is—” Claire started, still exhausted but almost back to her put together self, the persona Zack found most familiar.

“ _Claire_ ,” Grady stressed. “Please not now. Kids are listening.”

Kids were indeed listening.

Gray turned to Zack for reassurance, who honestly had none to give.

None that was true anyway.

“Everything is gonna be okay now,” he said softly to Gray’s trusting—pleading—face.

 _He_ _lies_.)

 

 

Gray is horizontal already, head propped up on Zack’s thigh—he didn’t ask and Zack didn’t think to tell him off, which would have been unthinkable yesterday—but not sleeping either.

He says nothing about Zack’s choice of unusual physical contact, nothing when Zack _maybe_ starts petting the long strands just because he can, nothing until a few minutes later when Grady has also joined in shouting at Claire’s phone, looking just as outraged as she does, and

“Zack?”

“Yeah?” 

Gray takes a deep breath and exhales in a great big whoosh that sounds too big for his tiny body. “Did you know dinosaurs first appeared in Triassic period about 231.4 million years ago?”

Zack feels the distant and very familiar urge to smack him one. It fades before he can even wonder why it feels so damn _dull_.

“No, I didn’t know that.” But he does know Gray and that the ‘did you know?’ bit was just him opening the floor to a topic he could probably write a dissertation on if he wanted. 

He also knows that any kind of reaction only encourages the sharing of more information which is why he usually ignores the brief Wikipedia-esque rants until Gray runs out of steam. He knows that admitting ignorance is tactic permission for the future Professor Gray to educate his dumb ass.

Zack himself has never slipped up and sat through a lecture by his kid brother who ought to be in third grade but isn’t. He has witnessed it happen to his mom and dad though and laughed at their misfortune.

Odd that the prospect doesn’t seem so bad now. And they always put Gray in a fantastic mood so. Whatever. Fantastic is probably out of the question at this point, but no longer worryingly quiet seems equally appealing.

Gray takes a quick breath. “Well, they were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years until—”

 

 

The Mitchells are supposed to arrive in seven hours.

They took the first flight they could get, Aunt Claire says, but Zack and Gray both know that doesn’t mean they’re going to be in Costa Rica any time soon.

Their own flight was three hours after all and that was with good weather and a tailwind. 

There are a lot of people here. Twenty two thousand, all in different warehouses turned parking grounds for Jurassic World patrons. Not all of them can move under their own power but they do have family and there are a limited number of seats on a limited number of flights.

Seven hours is reasonable. Still.

Zack has not slept or eaten in that entire time. He has not been on his phone either, though Claire gave it back to him before they set up camp in this endless cot hell. It’s pretty much busted beyond repair.

Whatever. He’s pretty sure he can get it replaced and the files are backed up on his computer so no big loss.

He has also not once screamed at Gray to shut up and get the hell away from him even though he’s been wanting to for the past three hours because it turns out that Gray?

Knows a lot about dinosaurs (clade: dinosauria _,_ meaning: ‘terrible lizard’). 

(Even though there’s no real evidence that they had scales apparently. Zack is going to have to live with that information for the entirety of his _natural life._ )

And he also hasn’t cottoned onto the fact that maybe Zack?

Doesn’t want to hear another word about fucking dinosaurs for the rest of his life, which is probably how long Gray can talk about them like they’re still the coolest thing ever.

(How?)

Fuck a dissertation. The boy could write a book. A series of books.

After the general history overview, which Zack had not recognized until it was over, came the specific history of actual dinosaurs. And their descriptions, habitats, diet, social structure, migratory tendencies, and anything else Gray thought worth mentioning.

He’d rambled through the major extinctions, how the dinosaurs in each period evolved as a whole and separately, quoting verbatim some guy named Grant who claimed they turned into birds.

(Zack is going to eat so much chicken when he gets home. Seriously. All the chicken. And he’ll _laugh._ )

For a foolish minute somewhere after hour four, Zack had thought that might be the end of it. Past to present, thank fuck it’s over, Gray’s eyes were practically sparkling he was so pleased to have talked himself hoarse, mission fucking accomplished, when—

“And if you think _that’s_ cool, just wait till you know what the first paleontologists did when they found the first dinosaur bones in Europe in the nineteenth century.” Gray beams up at him and leans into his stomach to whisper conspiringly, “They tripped _balls_.”

“Language,” Zack says automatically. 

His head is reaching truly horrific levels of agony and if there was an ice pick on hand he might try jamming it into his eye socket to see if that helped. He’s just— so tired. Soooo tired. He wants to sleep for a week. Minimum.

“What about the first dinosaur bones?” He asks instead and kind of hates himself. He better get a billion good big brother points for putting up with this. No, _ten_ billion.

Gray looks ecstatic, like he didn’t die nearly God knows how many times in the last twenty four hours, like Zack just gave him the moon and stars and the sun for his birthday.

That look, Zack thinks, could do terrible things to his reputation for being a recalcitrant asshole.

“Well,” Gray huffs. “The Chinese thought they were dragon bones for a while and—”

Six hours down and Gray’s voice starts to crack mid-word. It doesn’t even slow him down aside from Zack’s brief journey to get water for him, and he says ‘get’ but it should really be ‘steal’ seeing as he swipes two bottles from the end of somebody’s cot who’s sleeping and thus, doesn’t need them as much.

He then proceeds to—forcefully—persuade Gray to drain them both and then hides the evidence in a temporarily empty cot.

Claire is asleep at this point.

Grady is not.

He watches what Zack does with only a raised eyebrow to show for it and doesn’t comment, smiling faintly and going back to looking towards Claire but not really _at_ her.

Zack makes a mental note: there might be something wrong with Owen Grady. 

But it’s not his problem or his responsibility to deal with it (even though he is grateful the guy saved their lives), so he does what he does best and plans to ignore it until it becomes an unignorable problem, tuning back into his (impossible) little brother’s rant in time to hear,

“...the biggest bones tended to survive the longest but there were actually a lot of small dinosaurs too. There was one that was only fifty centimeters and—”

Zack tunes right back out.

 

 

The seventh hour rolls around.

Zack isn’t sure what he expects.

Scott and Karen Mitchell aren’t there.

 _Well, of course they aren’t_ , he muses, twisting his fingers into Gray’s hair again and closing his eyes.

He hurts. 

He’s trying to be an adult because that’s what he’s gotta be right now but it’s hard and he hurts and he’d like it all to stop please.

 

 

Perhaps the start of a new tradition, Grady comes to the rescue in their time of need.

“Hey,” he says, reaching over to nudge Zack’s shoulder because he’s starting to list to one side. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll watch that one.” He nods at Gray.

Zack turns to check Gray’s response to this and isn’t really surprised to find the stars in his eyes have stars.

“Sure,” he grunts, too tired to feel much of anything, and he’s down before he knows what’s happening.

The last thing he hears is Gray’s voice, high and fast with excitement, “Can you tell me about your velociraptors, Owen? Please, please, _please_?”

“They aren’t really my raptors, but sure.” Grady sounds bemused, but then most people are when confronted with a full dose of Gray Enthusiasm. To his credit, he recovers fast.

“Cool!”

And he’s out.

He doesn’t dream.


End file.
